“You have kept us waiting, Nicolas,” he said. I was thunder-struck. Emma sank on the ground foaming at the mouth, and twisting about under the furniture. “Jetzt!” cried the professor. A rustle of dresses in the next room--I heard the lay-figures fall. Wilhelm and Johann flung themselves on me. Bound! Caught! Lost! And the terror of torture made me a coward. “Uncle,” I entreated, “kill me at once, I beg you. No torture! A revolver; the dagger--poison! Anything you like, uncle, but no torture!” Lerne sniggered, as he flipped Emma’s cheeks with a wet towel. I felt myself going mad. Who knows if Macbeth’s reason had not gone in a moment like this! Macbeth! Klotz! The hallucination made me feel a sharp pain, which pierced my skull from temple to temple. The assistants took me downstairs, Johann at my head--Wilhelm at my feet. Were they simply going to put me away in a locked room! A nephew, damn it all, is not to be slaughtered like a chicken! They took their way to the laboratory. In my fainting condition, my whole life, day by day, passed before me in the moment of a heart’s beat. The Professor joined us. We went past the Germans’ block, and along beside the courtyard wall. Lerne opened a door on the ground floor of the left wing, and I was laid out under the operating theater, in a sort of wash-house that was as bare as a sepulcher, and all inlaid with white tiles. A curtain of thick cloth hanging from a rod on rings, separated it into two compartments of equal size. Its atmosphere was that of a chemist’s shop. There was plenty of light in it. They had set up against the wall a little truckle-bed, which Lerne pointed out to me saying, “Your bed has been ready for you for some time, Nicolas.” Then my uncle gave some instructions to the Germans, in their native language. The two assistants having unbound me, undressed me. Resistance was useless. A few minutes later I was comfortably lying in bed, with sheets up to my chin, and tucked in. Johann alone watched over me, sitting astride on a stool, the only ornament of this austere place. The curtain drawn aside let me see another folding door--the door into the courtyard. In front of me,--through the bay window, I saw my old friend the fir tree. My sadness increased. My mouth had a bad flavor in it, as if it had already tasted its approaching decomposition. “Oh, to think that in a short time some filthy chemistry would be a prelude to that!” Johann toyed with a revolver, and aimed it at me every now and again, much pleased with his excellent joke. I turned round towards the wall, and that caused me to discover an inscription engraved in uncouth letters on the varnish of the tiling, made by the help, at least so I thought, of the jewel in a ring: “Good-by, for ever, my dear father; Donovan.” The unhappy man. He also had been laid on this bed--Klotz also, and who could prove that my uncle had made only those two his victims before me; but I cared very little.